[1] Is it possible for Christians to express earnest and thoughtful disagreement with one another about contested political issues while retaining shared community in Christ? As a matter of actual practice, is it possible to imagine openly disagreeing in a productive way within congregations without vilifying one’s opponents? This is the challenge that Amy Carr and Christine Helmer’s theological study of the damaging effects of contemporary polarization brings to its readers. As an antidote, Carr and Helmer articulate a concept of “ordinary faith” and bring fresh interpretative attention to the Lutheran theology of justification. This review attempts to recapitulate both these focal areas while training its sight on the practical question of truthful disagreement within Christian community which can only be answered through one’s actions of discipleship off the page.
[2] Potential readers who base an impression off the title might assume that the authors’ vision of “ordinary” faith amounts to a middle-ground stance of non-offensive “niceness.” But such an association misleads. The fact that the authors devote a central chapter to close and unflinching attention to abortion, integrating theological reflection alongside the first-person stories of women who have broken silences and told the circumstances of how they came to seek abortions, that fact demonstrates that what ordinary faith means for the authors is anything but the avoidance of challenge.
[3] First, “ordinary” faith involves taking the risk of moving a polarized conversation in a community away from fixed and abstract judgements about an issue and toward hearing the personal stories of ordinary people who find themselves at the roots of political divides. Ordinary faith as an antidote for polarization does not mean limiting conversation to the exchange of pleasantries, but rather the practice of listening for what is truly at stake for actual people involved in the issues, and seeking the sustaining presence of the God known through Christ Jesus in the midst of the tension such open conversation brings.
[4] Likewise, an assumption that the authors take “ordinary faith” as a synonym for a blankly moderate or uncommitted stance on issues also misleads. When Christians uncritically adopt into their own speech patterns the scripts handed to them by surrounding political media, they are liable to take every disagreement as an opportunity to detect and magnify the errors and sins of the other political side: “A high conflict expression of Christian faith finds perverse comfort in identifying who is right and wrong on moral and political issues.” (4-5) The adjective “high” for this kind of speech pattern limited perversely to attacking and reacting is apt: such polarized expressions float above the granular level of interpersonal communication in shared settings where any traction on understanding each other’s differences is even possible (4-5). To speak out of one’s ordinary faith is yes to give an account of one’s serious and committed political views, but the ordinary aspect is the refusal to replace real people and actual dialogue for the imaginary opponents fabricated and handed down in polarized discourse.
[5] Finally, a third way of explicating “ordinary” faith comes closer to the association with the word “regular” or “normal.” Following Carr and Helmer what is valuable about “ordinary” faith is not that it fits the mold of a fixed norm but rather the fact that ordinary lives are complicated: most people have from their experiences, roles, and identities a set of stances on contested issues that may vary from or at times contradict the stereotype of a given partisan identity: and that’s normal. What’s extraordinary or artificial however is the purity that contemporary political discourse encourages. Putting up political signs on private lawns, posting public memes from personal social media accounts, shouting slogans in a short-lived crowd, all these gestures are often only social and public in so far as they are an aggregation of individual performances. The messiness of shared spaces where individuals actually communicate across differences and varying disagreements is something quite different from cultivating an isolated and extraordinarily pure political identity on one’s own. Whenever anyone commits to a shared endeavor within a congregation, school district, non-profit, union, or even local branch of a political organization, the messy and ordinary fact of personal difference and disagreement interposes itself. Taken this way, “ordinary faith” means one is more committed to working through collective efforts within institutions than to the pursuit of extraordinary individual purity.
[6] In order to turn toward the second theological focus which is justification, I want to compare Carr and Helmer’s attention to polarization in the U.S. with that of Amartya Sen for the Indian context in his book Identity and Violence.[1] Sen considers the way that Muslims and Hindus lived side-by side for generations before the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Neighbors who once related to one another on a daily marketplace basis became political enemies almost overnight when the British imposed Partition from above, forcing neighbors to relocate to the newly formed states which drew political borders around Muslim and Hindu identities. Sen’s book follows the toxic role of politicians in both countries who use the rhetorical form of arguments by necessity: these politician reason that because conflict between religious groups is a matter of a geopolitical inevitability, polarized opposition is the only course. For Sen, the way out of toxic polarization is to retrieve an enlightenment option for exercising rational choice: within the situation of polarization, it is always still possible to refute the narrative that conflict is inevitable, to reflect upon oneself in such a way that one chooses to place one’s religious identity back into the shared marketplace conditions where neighbors build relationships and interact on the basis of common economic grounds.
[7] The point I draw from this detour to Sen’s book with its similar observations about polarization is to retrieve for myself and for readers of Carr and Helmer the role of choice: when I consider my own Christian community, I don’t need to accept that political excellence means pursuing my own individual purity. I can choose to seek excellence in how I engage actual people, placing my energies in facilitating conversations across disagreements.
[8] Where Carr and Helmer differ from Sen’s rationalism, however, is in their attention to the positive and constructive role of belief. Their approach is an illuminating, patient, and thorough interpretation of the Lutheran theology of justification by grace through faith for the situation of polarization. Again, the comparison with Sen on choice is significant because here the point is precisely to retrieve a theology that centers upon God’s choice and actions in Jesus Christ. To define whether one is truly Christian by the choice to wear a mask or not during a Covid lock-down is to make the “fruit” of specific choices defining for one’s identity, and to relegate the “tree” of one’s relational rootedness in Christ to the position of a background assumption. But the traditional Lutheran theology of justification reverses that very order: it is God’s defining action which grafts the believer into the tree of Christ’s cross from which the fruit of concrete actions and practical choices in public ethics flow.
[9] Learning to become fluent in the theology of justification in this way is to retrieve the invitational resources to help other Christians remember and discern the critical relationship between the tree and the fruit. Even if we have a choice to pursue excellence through facilitating communication within our ordinary local Christian communities rather than pursuing the excellence of our own purity, what we do not choose but only experience is the Holy Spirit’s power in together making us wholly receptive: in emotionally re-experiencing the power of God’s choice to graft us to the tree of Christ’s cross and to untangle us from the idolatrous investment of the heart in polemics against each other.
[10] Perhaps the most creative way Carr and Helmer adapt justification is to describe the gift of faith as a gifted spaciousness, a spaciousness that unfolds from the presence of Christ who chooses to plant himself as a tree of life in the very midst of traumatic human conflicts. To recapitulate my attention to “ordinary faith” in the preceding paragraphs: to commit to shared spaces and to work within the inevitable human conflicts and against the grain of institutional failures, is to practice an ordinary faith rooted in Christ whose love at work in us opens up the gracious space of freedom to listen, dialogue, and engage productively on even the most fraught and risky topics. It’s in learning to discern the way that the hardy fruit of patience and truthfulness flows from the tree of Christ’s passion for us that justification can indeed become understand as a practiced way of life, pursued as the dialogical practices that encourage spaciousness amidst tension.
[1] Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence. Norton: New York, 2006.
Ole A. Schenk is an ELCA pastor at United Lutheran Church in Oak Park, IL.